Hbee Inc.

The past couple of days, I’ve had some fun run-ins with some new wingnuts. I’m sure that nothing I offer raises any new pathologies to those familiar with this sub-category of humans but…

The aptly named Charile0 on twitter makes me happy that twitter got invented. Charlie’s xtian bona fides blow everyone out of the water and scream DON’T FUCK WITH CHARLIEZERO!

Christian, Conservative, Pro-Life, Teacher, Retired from State Police (civilian.) That means I am civilized.

There’s nothing like showing your hand. I don’t mean to imply that all cops suck because they don’t. But I’m pretty sure that Abner Louima and more than a few other alleged perps and mob bosses might disagree with that generalization. Charlie is the hyperfocus kind of wingnut on twitter. They find a victim they think they can beat on and bang away until they run out of steam…then bang away some more. After he evangelized to a few twitterbuds, I couldn’t help but jump in.  Especially when he started in about how God wanted him to to “sow his seed” even in infertile ground. How can you pass up a good semen joke?

Isn’t it a sin to waste your seed?

Hilariously, it took him a little while to understand the reference. Most of our precious time spent together consisted of him trying to suss out whether I was a xtian. They want to know since it really does affect how they talk to you. Apparently, dealing with a fellow xtian that disagrees with you calls for different rules and it twists their little brains into balloon animals to talk about pretty much anything outside the context of God. “You’re profile doesn’t say whether you’re a xtian”, he grumped.

Insight 1: Wingnuts constantly try to make you play by the rules that they make up. I honestly don’t mean to denigrate tw0-years but c’mon!  That’s like having a conversation about fruit and insisting that everything be put in terms of cantaloupe.

As he blathered on about “God” and the US and the troops he tried to take me to task about my “tcot hates America” avatar. (“tcot” for those of you who don’t know, stands for “top conservatives on twitter”. my own hashtag for them, Conservative Understanding Nothing Tangential, never took off.) it occurred to me just how powerful the wingnut echo chamber is.

Charlie0: why do you say tcot hates america?

Me: lemme ask you – do you support killing our own troops?

Charlie0: of course not!

Me: Yes, you actually do. haliburton has electrocuted several of our troops through faulty shower wiring and STILL got paid.

Charlie0: i didn’t hear about that

Really? And why might that be, Charlie? Maybe because your sources of “news” tell you that everything is running to plan and anyone who says differently is lying? Maybe, if you got outside of your lil Jesus-cocoon you might realize the “main stream media” is “main stream” for a reason – ie: they report on far more aspects of a story than Fox. You would like to think that if a contractor killed the troops that wingnuts say we hate they’d raise a fuss. Ironically, the only sources that really reported it were…the sources that theoretically hate the troops.

Insight 2: Wingnuts mis-read 1984.

Later in the week, I popped on the Facebook group I hate it when I wake up in the morning and Barack Obama is President. And, yes, it’s as horrible as it sounds. What brought me into it was one in a series about fake founding father quotes that are so popular with the brown shirts. The way it works is…well, you just make something up that advances your agenda and say a founding father said it. Take, for example, Billy Bob Neck’s entry

“We, as a people, must always remain vigilant that the Negro not attain office. It will signal the rise of communism” Thomas Jefferson

The most dangerous thing about fake quotes is that, like WMD, even after debunking they continue to be used. Picture Winston Smith busily modifying the “facts” to fit the current administration. In fact, even with such an obviously fake quote (which sadly finally got removed) it got at least one comment to the effect of – “I don’t care WHAT the founding fathers said, posting that wasn’t right!”

Again – back to Winston Smith.

Insight 3: Only Democrats do bad things.  If Patrick Henry turned out to be a serial rapist, wingnuts would find some way to mitigate the damage and would probably succeed. The lamest outrage against Obama is…golfing…twice during the BP crisis. And he did a bunch of stuff like campaign for other Democrats.  What he should have been doing, I guess, is sleeping in the oval office and pissing in jars until every last drop of oil got scooped up. Naturally, I’ve not heard one wingnut go after bush for not only golfing during the war but promising not to and doing it anyway. Obama would have gotten the same treatment if he’d cleared brush with bush in Crawford.

Insight 4: Even when blatantly shown the truth, wingnuts will continue the lie.  During my roll in the mud, I happened to call someone a “moran”.  To the politically astute, this is an obvious dig at the illiterate teabaggers and their even more illiterate signs.

Since very few teabaggers actually follow politics, preferring just to scream whatever they’re told to and wave guns around, he didn’t pick up on it. Rather, he criticized me for my spelling. When I pointed out that I actually meant to call him a “moran” and linked him to the source, he shut up for a little bit. Until someone commented on it. His response was not to just shrug it off. Instead, he said “Well, he said he did it on purpose but I’m not so sure.”

This is the most disturbing aspect of wingnuttery. It’s one thing to blindly parrot everything Fox tells you. After all, why would a politician lie? It’s quite a different thing entirely to, in a face to face interaction with a live human being, to reject iron-clad evidence simply because you’re on opposite sides of the political fence.  In general, I don’t believe most of what comes out of any wingnuts mouth. BUT. I usually take the time to research what they’re saying.  The only thing the teabaggers have done for America is make it ruder and more distrustful of its fellow citizens. They pervert almost everything they touch.

What started this all off was a “quote” from Abraham Lincoln.

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

He didn’t say that. He said something similar, true, but it apparently had too many words and wingnuts got confused so someone helpfully shortened it and turned it into “English”.  Plug the phrase into Google and you’ll get 1000′s of hits…all of them from wingnut websites and since it’s on so many websites, it must be real, right? It took some digging to get to the truth.

Lincoln is right, though. Even now, wingnuts actively work to literally change the historical record to fit their twisted, lop-sided vision of truth. And they don’t care if they’re right or not.

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